Bing Remembers

"I am supposed to ask tactless questions," said the ship reporter on a chilly morning in November 1949.

"Ah yes, and I am supposed to give evasive answers," replied the thin, aristocratic-looking man with a Viennese accent.

With that, Rudolf Bing, general manager-designate of the Metropolitan Opera, strode off the Queen Elizabeth and into operatic history. The remarkable thing about Bing during the two decades that followed was that he rarely gave evasive answers--at least to the press. "Reporters found me what is called good copy," he recalls. He never evaded a fight either--whether with prima donnas or temperamental conductors. When last winter, during his final season at the Met, it was announced that he had written his memoirs, the general reaction was "of course." Bing liked to have the last word, and with that career and acerbic personality, why not?

The result, 5,000 Nights at the Opera (Doubleday; $10), is a good book that should have been better. Indulging in the perennial prerogative of the autobiographer, Bing opts mostly for one side of the story--his. He says nothing of his glaring failure to bring Soprano Beverly Sills to the Met, for example, but grows highly petulant because she and the New York City Opera scheduled Donizetti's Tudor trilogy (Maria Stuarda, Anna Bolena, Roberto Devereux) at the same time he was planning it at the Met for the Spanish prima donna Montserrat Caballe. "We finally accepted the fact that Beverly Sills of the City Opera, having been born in Brooklyn, was entitled to priority in the portrayal of British royalty," Bing bitchilly recalls.

However tart his tongue and whatever his shortcomings, Bing unquestionably saved the Met itself from near-collapse. What he found in 1950 "was much worse than I had expected, in every way," says Bing. By the time he was through, he had set a managerial record virtually unparalleled in opera annals. He boosted ticket sales to 97% of capacity (before they dropped to 85% in the last four years), came up with new productions of 80 operas, put the company on a year-round basis, and found it a badly needed new home in Lincoln Center.

All this was in spite of various glaring differences with his board of directors, whom Bing does not spare in his book. Of George Moore, for example, Met president and former board chairman of the Manhattan-based First National City Bank, Bing writes: "Moore could not believe there is a basic, unbridgeable difference between a theater and a bank or a rug factory." But, as Bing readily concedes, Moore time and again came up with money the Met badly needed.

Nor could Bing get on with union negotiators. "There is no question that my style and personality are not right for the American labor movement. They don't feel comfortable with me, and to tell the truth, I don't feel comfortable with them." Once during a tense session with the stagehands, Bing leaned forward over the table and said, "I'm awfully sorry, I didn't get that. Would you mind screaming it again?"

Bing made it a point not to appear personally friendly with the artists who worked for him. He did yearn, though, to be on better terms with Conductor Herbert von Karajan. Bing brought Karajan to the Met in 1967 to stage Wagner's Ring cycle, and found him "unquestionably the outstanding artistic phenomenon of my later years at the Metropolitan." Friendship with Karajan Bing could not manage. "You offer him a cigarette, he says he doesn't smoke," says Bing. "You offer him a drink, he doesn't drink. Let's have lunch; he never has lunch." Dissatisfied with rehearsal conditions, Karajan would not tell Bing directly, but would have his New York manager write Bing a letter. "It is hard to develop any great feelings of warmth when collaborative work is done on that basis." Bing was not always too helpful himself. Once, after a typically murky performance of Wagner in Vienna, Karajan boasted that it was the result of eight lighting rehearsals. Replied Bing: "I could have got it that dark with one."

Nasty Man. As for the other conductors who worked for him, Bing has a quick quip for all. Stokowski? "He went around the house correcting the way people pronounced each other's names." Reiner? "Not among the naturally light-at-heart." Bernstein? "He wanted us to do Cav after Pag, to give him the final curtain." Szell? "He was a nasty man, God rest his soul. I remember somebody once said to me, 'George Szell is his own worst enemy.' I said, 'Not while I am alive.' "

Bing responded to singers in emotional and hard-to-predict ways. In 5,000 Nights, he forgives Tenor Franco Corelli his rages and frequent last-minute cancellations because he is "the incarnation of opera." But the late Jussi Bjoerling, who sang with a lyric grace beyond Corelli's comprehension but who annoyed Bing by his grudging attitude toward rehearsals, is not forgiven his sins--"a very irresponsible artist."

Despite his tiffs with Maria Callas (he fired her in 1959, re-engaged her in 1965 for two Toscas), Bing regards her Met debut in 1956 in Norma as "the most exciting of all such in my time at the Metropolitan." Bing also recalls Callas' husband and manager Battista Meneghini, who insisted on being paid in cash before the curtain rose every night. Callas' fee then was $1,000. "Toward the end," recalled Bing, "I had him paid in five-dollar bills, to make a wad uncomfortably large for him to carry."

All these years Bing and his Russian wife Nina, a former ballerina, have lived in the Essex House on fashionable Central Park South. Although, he says, "I did not live in New York really; I lived at the opera house. Sunday, when the house was dark, I usually stayed in bed." Now 70 and still a British subject (knighted by the Queen in 1970), he plans to stay on in New York for the time being as "Distinguished Professor" at Brooklyn College (salary: $36,275; at the Met he earned $100,000), giving two courses in opera management. At the last board meeting of the Met, Bing mentioned that the college had an open admission policy and invited the directors to come and learn what they could. "I don't think that went down too well. That's my subtle way of making friends," he says.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.